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"The One Big Secret of Marketing Your Writing"
There's a big secret to marketing your writing. It's a secret that many
writers never learn. They don’t discover it on their own, and
professional writers rarely bother to share it.
Here's the BIG SECRET: YOU NEED TO PURSUE AND WOO YOUR MARKETS UNTIL
THEY BUY FROM YOU. That is, you need to make more than one contact with
a market --- you need to make many, many, many contacts, until that
particular market buys from you.
It makes sense. You have to make relationships in all other areas of
your life, so why should marketing your writing be any different?
It will take many contacts for an editor to buy from you. If you give
up too soon, you're letting yourself down.
Why does it take many contacts? Because editors are busy, and because
they're also human. Discovering new writers in the mass of proposals
and queries they receive every day comes last on an editor's long To Do
list.
Let's say that you send an article proposal to Painters Monthly
Magazine. (This is a fictitious magazine.)
The magazine's complete editorial staff consists of just an editor and
a deputy editor. Most of the editorial content is written by
contributing editors and freelancers. This motley group is responsible
for a 160-page magazine each month. Deadlines are on the 15th of each
month, when the magazine has to
be at the printer's.
The editor works late most nights. His wife is threatening to leave
him, because he's gone from seven in the morning until ten at night.
The editor spends most of his time cajoling, threatening and
encouraging his contributors to keep their promises and send material
when they say they will. He spends the rest of the time worrying about
the budget, and scheming with the
advertising manager to create deals with advertisers so that the
magazine's editorial pages won’t be cut back.
The editor receives a stack of mail every day, both postal mail and
email, including anywhere from 20 to 50 article proposals a day. Every
day.
The editor's job isn’t to read mail, much less proposals. It's to get a
magazine out the door each month. He doesn't have an assistant. How
much time do you think he spends reading the proposals?
That's right: as little time as possible.
You've got maybe two seconds to hook his interest if it's an email
proposal, maybe five seconds if it's a paper proposal.
Please don’t let this news depress you! It's not depressing news
at all. It's reality.
The reality is that you're trying to sell a product to someone
who wants your product, who desperately needs your product, who
couldn’t survive without your product, BUT --- that person is
busy. Not only is that person busy, he/ she's also soured on
proposals. (Why? Because most are not right for his publication,
but he has to wade through them all anyway, and the whole process
adds to the stress in his life.)
Therefore, when you send any editor a proposal, please don’t
assume that because there was no response, it means that you're a
lousy writer. It simply means that the editor is/ was/ and will
be forever busy. Maybe your proposal is still on his desk, buried
under a yard-high stack of paper. Maybe he deleted your message
without reading.
However, no matter how busy the editor is, Proposal 1 will make
him/ her vaguely aware of your name. If you never bother to send
the editor another query, you're forgotten. Whether you get a
response to your first query or not, send another query within
three to four weeks. I've heard of some writers sending a query
every week, but this is excessive. Once a month is fine. Keep
writing. Proposals 2, 3, 4... How long should you keep sending
proposals? You keep sending them until the editor buys from you,
or until you decide that you don’t want to be published at that
publication.
Because they’re not conversant with publishing realities, new
writers, and some selling writers who've never figured out how
the process works, let themselves down. It's a simple truth:
anyone can become a selling, professional writer if they approach
selling their work in a professional manner. This means pursuing
and wooing editors until they buy from you.
Copyright © 2003 by Angela Booth
*** This excerpt is from Digital-e's new ebook " Tell, Yell And
Sell: Marketing Skills For Writers", available October 2003. ***
http://www.digital-e.biz/
To read more articles by Angela Booth, visit the Digital-
e Web site--Information for writers and creatives.
Ebooks, free ezines, Creatives Club. Love to write? Turn
your talent into a business! http://www.digital-e.biz/
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